Tracing items is nowadays common practice in various industrial fields, such as the manufacturing and distribution of goods, verification and authentication of items (goods, products, documents, etc.) in the field, logistics, transportation, and the like. This tracing of items is already well supported by various conventional technical systems involving barcode readers, scanners, mobile terminals, network and communication equipment, sensors, detectors, satellite positioning systems, RF-ID equipment, servers, processing entities, data stores, and the like.
On a common scale, however, these systems employing all kinds of individual pieces of technical equipment as mentioned above, are usually distributed over the field, i.e. the area that the system for tracing items is to cover. More specifically, at a manufacturing site there may be installed scanners detecting the presence of items at various locations, delivery personnel may be provided with hand-held devices for registering receipt and delivery of individual or bundled items, communication equipment may receive and forward corresponding data from the scanners, devices, etc. to some central entity that processes, stores, and evaluates the data.
In a way, such systems of all kinds of distributed technical equipment then may allow for tracing one or more items in the field. In particular, the systems may allow for retrieving information on where one particular item is currently located, on what happened, and when, to a particular item, and what is the resulting state of the item as a result of some kind of operation. There are various examples for operations that can apply to items in the field, however common to all operations is that a particular operation puts one item into a particular, well-defined state. For example, an item can be traced to be at a specific location (GPS coordinates, town, country, etc.), traced to have been subject to one or more operation(s) (e.g. sold, opened, crossed a border, etc.) that, in turn, result in specific states of the items (e.g. warranty runs, no longer sellable, exported to another country, subject to tax, etc.).
These systems may be of particular use for optimizing manufacturing, distribution, service, maintenance and related processes. Furthermore, these systems may be used for authenticating and verifying the correct distribution and movement of items. For example, an item can be detected to be subject to an export operation (border crossed), whereas this item is actually not supposed to leave a country due to, for example, requirements regarding technical specifications and/or compatibility with local systems abroad.
Although the usually large-scale distribution of such systems allows for a large coverage area and, consequently, allows for tracing many items over a large geographical zone including many kinds of operations to the items, any distribution of systems usually suffers from difficulties as regards the collection and forwarding of information so as to enable accurate tracing. Specifically, any information collected in the field may be initially off-line, in the sense that a scanner or hand-held device collects data, but processes or forwards the collected data only with some delay, for example, after some pre-determined number of events have been recorded.
This can be the result of how the involved communication equipment works, since for each communication task a connection may need to be established which, in turn, causes power (battery) resources to be consumed or simply may require access to a communication network, which may not be accessible underground or inside of buildings. For example, the system may know that one item was produced in some first country and that later in time this very item was seen in the field in some second country. The information that the item correctly crossed a border may still be local with the transport company or customs authority and is yet to be reported, for example, at a next batch transfer at midnight or when a hand-held device again has access to a (wireless) communication network or is again put into its cradle. Naturally, also cost may play a role, as network operators may charge per connection, so that data is collected and retained deliberately.
In addition to the above, there are conventional systems that consider a so-called batch (or: periodical) processing of collected events, where each batch of events is ordered by time before processing. The period between such two batch processing runs thus defines how delayed events are accepted. All events that are older than a batch period are either rejected or those events, plus all events with a newer event time, need to be reprocessed.
In any way, there is the problem that the events of scanning, detecting, or—generally—subjecting an item to an operation, can suffer from delays when reported to some central data store or processing entity. However, such delays may degrade the accuracy of tracing the items. In a way, the system may not be able to provide accurate tracing with various possible disadvantageous consequences, such as lowering efficiency of the involved processes, causing an unnecessary consumption of energy resources, or—amongst others—triggering of false alerts.